NOTE - This tutorial was written for windows XP. I don't know if it works in vista, but I think it does.
1. Right click your desktop and select 'New' and choose 'Shortcut'.
2. Enter 'ftp://user : pass @ server/' as the location for it to shortcut to, replacing user with your FTP username, pass with your FTP password and server with your domain or IP (also delete the spaces).
3. Name the shortcut 'Virtual Disk' or something similar.
4. Right click your new shortcut, and select properties.
5. On the general tab, hit advanced and uncheck every option that pops up.
6. On the web document tab, hit change icon and find one that looks like a hard drive (look in C:\WINDOWS\System32\shell32.dll for some good ones)
7. Hit OK and OK again till your out of the properties dialog.
8. Double click the shortcut and enjoy your 'virtual hard drive'.
To add to the 'virtual hard drive' simply drag files to it from your PC folders or desktop and to open (or download) files from your 'virtual hard drive' simply double click them.
Note if you want to let your friends and family access the files on the drive, and your webspace is running on a linux server running apache, simply add 'public_html/' to the end of the shortcut's location and then going to '
http://yoururl/thefile' will download it. If you want to keep the files private, keep the location as the one in step 2.
It's basically similar to .mac's idisk, only that uses webdav, this uses ftp which is more widely used.
If you enjoyed the tutorial, feel free to donate a few $NPs.
- firecubes
P.S. - Before I get people commenting that you can do it better with samba, I know, but I *think* samba is for home networks rather than servers, though I don't use it so I don't know. And before someone says you can do it with webdav in cpanel 11, not everyone has cpanel 11 and even if they do, alot of hosts disable it (2 of mine have).
Oh and before someone says it would be slow, it won't if you have a fast internet connection and a fast server connection, at least it doesn't for me.
Oh and don't do this will illegal files such as downloaded music and movies as your host/server provider will kick you lol.
